Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Sefer Hassidim

Looks like the Princeton website on Sefer Hassidim is up and running. It requires registration, which I just applied for, so I haven't seen the site on the inside yet. I wonder about the significance of textual variants among manuscripts of SH (and in general about the value of collecting variants on a large scale for works without a complicated textual history). My impression is that, while they may contain a range of different passages, the variants for a single passage are not usually large. But that's just a vague impression based on the Parma ms compared to the Bologna edition, and I may be completely wrong. Hopefully the database will give an answer.